Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO

Video is an enormous part of the Internet today. At least two thirds of all Internet traffic is streaming video. YouTube is the third most-visited website in the US and the world, and its users add a mind-boggling 300 hours of new content every minute—dwarfing the video produced for broadcast or cable television. And unlike television, online video came into being without government oversight, all due to one important neutral platform for innovation—the Internet.

“It is disturbing to learn that African governments support copyright exceptions”, said author Elinor Sisulu, in a pamphlet distributed by the International Authors' Forum to delegates at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva this week. At a side event organized by IFFRO (the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations) on Tuesday, Katie Webb, Administrator of the Forum, painted a dire picture of authors living below the poverty line and laid the blame squarely upon the copyright exceptions used by libraries and educational institutions. Canada was singled out for particular criticism for having broadened educational exceptions in 2012, leading to a reduction in royalties paid to a monopoly collecting society.

EFF is in Geneva this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where the organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is gathered to debate proposals for a treaty to give new legal rights to broadcasters, and for instruments that would standardize copyright limitations and exceptions for libraries, archives, educators and researchers.

More about those proposals will be coming in a series of updates this week. But first, why are we at WIPO at all? Here's a short history lesson to explain.

Member states of the United Nations concluded the draft of an international treaty this week that gives people with visual and reading disabilities better access to copyrighted works. The treaty comes as the result of collective efforts to carve out protections for the blind and reading disabled that faced years of resistance from rightsholder industries. Drafting efforts spanned nearly a decade at the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), culminating in a final session in Marrakesh, Morocco running from June 17 until they finalized the treaty on Tuesday.